


Nocturne

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Friendship, Late Night Conversations, Music, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 07:26:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4513116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An impromptu piano performance awakens some old memories for Jack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nocturne

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place at some indeterminate point post-3x08.
> 
> A couple of scenes that I'm not sure what else to do with, but they seemed to belong together.

“You can still get away, you know,” Phryne pointed out to her escort for the annual hospital charity soiree, as they parked the car in the gravel drive that led up to Aunt Prudence’s palatial home. “I know how much you dislike parties of this kind.”

Jack busied himself straightening his black tie in the Hispano’s rear view mirror and smoothing his carefully pomaded hair. “It’s not the parties themselves I mind, Phryne.”

“I know.” She laid an understanding hand on his thigh.

Her touch made Jack give up on the pretense of tidying what was already immaculate. “What I _dislike_ is the fact that somehow at these bean-feasts, I somehow always end up on display. Either it’s your aunt’s society friends gawping at us behind their fans because Prudence Stanley’s niece had the audacity to step out with a policeman, or else it’s _your_ society friends all facetiously congratulating me at having bagged the richest bird in Melbourne.”

Phryne’s mouth dropped in delighted astonishment. “No! Someone said that?”

“Yes, at your aunt’s birthday fête, last month.”

“Who?”

Jack pursed his lips and shook his head. “If I tell you, there’ll be murder done.” He looked apprehensively at the brightly lit, noisy house. “Although that might not be such a bad thing...”

“Look on the bright side, Jack.” Phryne grinned impishly and kissed him. “Imagine what they’d all say if they knew we weren’t actually planning to get married.”

Jack’s expression was somewhere between amusement and indigestion. “...I’d really rather not.” He girded his loins and exited the car with what he hoped was only a fraction of the distaste he truly felt. Phryne’s gorgeous figure, clad in a slinky gown of jet and silver, barely distracted him, but it certainly put a brief smile on his face. “Have I mentioned how much I like that dress?” he asked, handing her out of the car.

“I believe you did, Inspector,” Phryne purred, catching hold of his lapel and pulling him down so that she could add, in a whisper, “when I was putting it on.”

“Don't tease, Phryne,” he warned, his eyes dancing.

“That’s not a tease, Jack. It’s a rain check.” She offered her arm for Jack to take, smiling. “They’re waiting for us.”

With a rain check like that, even a stern, principled man like Jack Robinson could be coerced into joining a boozy society party. After all, it was in a good cause, for the hospital and so on.

Aunt Prudence met them at door, in a tizzy. “Oh, Phryne!” she said, drawing out her niece’s name as though she was already in the process of disapproving of something. “Oh, it’s too dreadful.”

“What's wrong, Aunt P?”

“Please tell me there hasn’t been a murder,” said Jack worriedly.

Prudence threw him a glance of utter irritation. “Oh, no, _nothing_ like that. For once,” she added, shifting her attention back to Phryne. “No, nothing _that_ awful. No, it’s the pianist, Mr. Hogarth.”

“Why, what's happened to Toddy?”

“He was supposed to arrive at four o’clock, but he was late, and you know how punctual Toddy is. And then his wife phoned not half an hour ago, to say that he’d been knocked down by a car!”

“How dreadful! Is he all right?”

“The doctor said he has a minor concussion, and a badly broken leg. So our band is without a piano player, and you know the dancing is one of the great draws of the hospital soiree.” Aunt Prudence looked round at her guests, who were already crowded round the drinks tables in varying states of conviviality. “You young people can get by with your squawking trumpets and trombones, but we need a pianist for the real dancing.”

For a moment, Phryne was utterly at a loss. Then she remembered the night of Hugh and Dot's engagement party. “Jack—”

He was already stepping forward. “Mrs. Stanley, perhaps I could assist.”

She looked up at him in dismay. “You, Inspector? Oh, surely not.”

“Aunt Prudence, don’t tell me I’ve never shared what a gifted piano player Jack is!” She squeezed his arm and simpered at him. “It’s how he wooed me.”

“...Is she serious, Inspector Robinson?”

“Absolutely," he said, his face as grim and dour as ever. “If it hadn’t been for the Police Academy being a more stable career, I would have joined the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic.”

“Oh,” fluttered Prudence, “in _that_ case, Inspector, allow me to introduce you to the other musicians...”

“The Royal Philharmonic?” Phryne whispered as they followed her aunt.

“Well, according to my mother, that’s what would have happened... I’m sorry this means I won’t have the pleasure of dancing with you tonight, Miss Fisher.”

“That’s all right.” Phryne looked about her, sizing up the gentlemen on offer. “I’m sure I can find _someone_ to lead me around the floor. Besides...” She leveled a smoky, promising gaze at Jack from beneath her eyelashes. “You’ll still have a rain check to collect on, later.”

She sauntered away, her hips shifting promisingly, as Jack watched the jet and silver beads move with every curve on her body. It was only a small loss, all things considered; the piano stool seemed much more inviting to him just now than an evening on the dance floor, particularly when the only type of dancing he wanted to do with Phryne at that moment was of a rather more… _intimate_ nature.

*** 

The low, sweet sound of piano music crept into Phryne’s dreams, and for a few precious, blissful moments (or for several hours, she couldn’t be sure), she was dancing, slowly revolving with Jack around a darkened, empty ballroom somewhere in Paris, or perhaps it was Vienna, but somewhere dark and decadently romantic, where a woman and a man could live forever on champagne breakfasts and nights of rain-drenched cobblestoned streets, and waltzes that were like making love.

Slowly, though, it occurred to her sleeping mind that she was not in France or Austria, she was in a guest bed at Aunt Prudence’s house, and she was alone. She frowned groggily and reached out for Jack, in case she was still dreaming. No, he was not there. The bed had been slept in, of course, after Jack had collected on his rain check _very_ thoroughly… but now the sheets were cool, with only the depression in the mattress and the rumpled bedcovers to show that he had been there.

Worry began to foment in Phryne’s mind, pushing out the lingering dreamy fog. Jack had not been sleeping well, these past few weeks. He often suffered from restless insomnia, and on those nights he would either take himself off to the guest bedroom, or else go downstairs to potter in the kitchen until dawn. But what could he do in Prudence’s house?

She rose from her uninviting bed, wrapped her body in a long embroidered dressing gown, and made her careful way downstairs, following the music.

Jack sat at the piano in the ballroom, barefoot, in blue pajamas, his hair still tousled and wild from the pillow, gently playing the quiet bits of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’.

 _Well,_ Phryne thought, leaning in the doorway, _that explains Vienna._

He came to the end of the first movement and let the final notes trail off.

“Were you serious when you told Aunt Prudence about the Royal Philharmonic?” she asked, with a little smile.

Jack looked up and gazed at her thoughtfully, contemplating the dark hair floating about her face. He seemed completely unsurprised to find her watching him. “When I was a small boy, I seriously considered it.”

“What stopped you?”

“The idea of dying penniless in a gutter somewhere, which my father assured me was the fate of all foolish boys who tried to become professional musicians.” Jack grinned suddenly, giving his face a brief moment of sunshiny brightness, despite looking utterly gaunt with exhaustion. “He also told me in no uncertain terms that ‘proper cowboys don’t play the piano, Jacky, they play the g’tar.’”

“A shameful use of tactical misdirection,” Phryne asserted, coming to sit beside him on the little piano bench. Jack slid over and inch or so to make room for her, but it was very close quarters, which neither of them minded. “So you listened to your father?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I gave up serious music after he passed. Mum was paying for the lessons, but after Dad died she couldn’t afford them anymore.” Jack traced the black and white keys with an idle fingertip. “I dabbled here and there, after that, when I could. In pubs, at the Police Academy.” The muscles of his jaw tightened in a manner that Phryne was becoming familiar with, and she leaned against him, just enough to give him a little more physical support. “When I was wounded at the Front… after they patched me up, they decided I wasn’t fit enough to go back to Australia, so they sent me to a convalescent home for a while. While I was there, I met a fellow who’d been a professional concert pianist before the war. God, that poor bastard…”

Very carefully, Phryne laid her hand on Jack’s thigh. He pressed her fingers briefly, desperately, and then started the sonata over, talking as he played. It seemed to calm him. “His name was Kempe.”

“…Not Antony Kempe?”

“Yes, his name was Antony.”

“I heard him play at the Royal Albert in London, just after the war started. He was brilliant.”

Jack nodded. “You probably heard his last performance.”

The flatness of Jack’s voice made Phryne’s stomach turn over. “Oh no…”

“He was at Vimy Ridge, propped up on sandbags and firing into the German lines, when a shell landed and exploded right next to him. Took off one arm completely, damaged the other hand so badly it had to be amputated, and blinded him.” Jack’s playing became a little louder and more forceful than was appropriate for three in the morning. Phryne squeezed his thigh gently, and the volume subsided. “When I got to the rest home, he was almost catatonic with despair. There was a piano in the recreation room, for the patients to use, but no one dared, for fear of upsetting him. Of course, no one bothered to tell me that, at the time, so one day I wheeled myself over and started playing. Very badly, as I recall.”

“Well, you were long out of practice,” Phryne teased, refusing to be upset at the thought of Jack in a wheelchair.

“Extremely. And my nerves were so dicey, I could barely hold my hands steady on the keys. I sounded ghastly. And the other men were quick to tell me so,” he added, quirking his eyebrows at the memory, “in very colourful language. And then over comes this poor man, scarred and burned, unable to see, can’t even feel where he’s going, but just… drawn by the sound of the piano. And he says to me, ‘You’re bloody awful. Move over.’ So I moved over, and he sat down, and started giving me a proper lesson. No way to demonstrate, no way of seeing that my posture and position were correct, but he could hear everything I did wrong, and he taught me to hear the same things. I’d been fair to middling at picking a tune out of the air before that, but after? I don’t think I’ve bothered with sheet music since. He even corrected my _breathing_. It was unbelievable, Phryne.” She laid her head on his shoulder, and he lifted one hand absently to her hair. The other kept playing, picking out the soft, somber notes. “He taught me so much, and he kept me sane when I might have easily gone mad. I didn’t get to go home, after I was patched up and able to move again. They sent me back to the Front. Having the music in my head, and Kempe’s voice… there were some nights when that was all I had to hang on to. He was a godsend.”

“It sounds as if you were as much to him,” she said, her eyes closed.

“That’s what the medical staff told me. They’d feared he would give up on life altogether, or find a way to commit suicide. Realizing that he could still teach gave Kempe a reason to keep living.” Jack let the music fade away. “It’s one of the only good memories I have, of the war.”

“And you were thinking about Kempe tonight?”

“I got a letter from him this morning, before we left the house. Written by his secretary, of course… we’ve corresponded sporadically over the years, since he was discharged and I was sent back to the trenches. He’s managed to get along well for himself as a teacher, in spite of his disabilities. He’s getting married next year, in England. He’s invited me to the wedding.” Jack pulled a folded piece of stationary from the breast pocket of his pajama top and opened it so that Phryne could see.

“‘It is no exaggeration to say that I owe my life, and therefore my happiness, to my first and most fondly remembered student, and it would give me great pleasure if you would stand at my side as my best man.’” Phryne touched the paper gently, feeling an instinctive disconnect between the passionate musician who had uttered the words and the calm, collected secretary who had set them down. “Will you accept?”

Jack nodded once. His dark eyes were tired, but calm. “He’s never asked me for anything else, and it’s no exaggeration to say that in some ways, I owe him my life, too.”


End file.
